Tapping the Potential of Wastewater in Saudi Arabia

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The team at Kaust also plans to enlarge its lab-sized bioreactor to treat the wastewater produced by the community living and working at the University. Hong and her group are hoping to use these scaled-up anaerobic membrane bioreactors as a decentralized wastewater treatment technology to treat the wastewater on-site.

The team is researching on the potential impact of this treated wastewater on food safety. They are also collaborating with their plant sciences colleague Professor Ikram Blilou and her team to examine the impact on crop yield and plant health. At the same time, the scientists are coupling what they have learned about the emerging microbial contaminants and developing low-cost biocidal strategies to further inactivate these contaminants so as to enhance the safety of reuse water. The aforementioned biocidal strategies can also be expanded and be used in other water sources — for example, in seawater.

To better assess the water quality, Hong's team is also developing tools to provide faster and more accurate water quality testing, which they believe is essential to better protect public health. Along with her Ph.D. student Hong Cheng, Hong is also investigating biological fouling, or biofouling, and how it impacts water treatment research.

According to Hong, their research has highlighted the fact that existing wastewater treatment plants need to be retrofitted with better technology — for example, membrane filtration, to ensure substantial removal of contaminants. However, one problem with membrane-based technologies was biofouling. Biofouling depreciates the lifespan of the membrane and increases the operational costs. Many strategies exist to eradicate biofilm formation on it, and there is a limit to how much biofilm we can remove at the end of the day.

In this study, the team at Kaust adopted a change in the paradigm. Instead of being focused on eradicating the biofilm, they asked whether it is possible to let the biofilm grow to a certain level/thickness and then observed whether the biofilm was actually helping to achieve better water quality. The study showed that biofouling can help remove contaminants from wastewater by functioning as a layer that adsorbs contaminants.

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Wastewater Can Be Safe Water

In the future, Hong would like to research the impact that climate change will play in global water scarcity. Climate change could exacerbate water scarcity, and we are going to see more events like extreme precipitation or prolonged drought that may further perturb water quality. Better surveillance technologies might be needed to monitor that.

Hong is of the opinion that water scarcity is not fully understood in some countries. "Take Saudi Arabia as an example; it is a highly water-stressed country with non-renewable groundwater supplies. Yet because water is a heavily subsidized commodity, people do not feel the need to conserve it," she said. Water usage rates in Saudi Arabia remain high at 265 liters per person per day, and it is expected to increase each year.

Until the problems related to water scarcity start impacting day-to-day activities, water scarcity remained an environmental issue that was hard for people to fully understand, Hong emphasized.

Hong believes that as a society, we already have treatment technologies that can convert wastewater into freshwater that is more pristine than some of the current groundwater supplies in use. However, she also believes that more outreach and education has to be done to change the perception people have towards treated wastewater for reuse. The scientist thinks that the 'yuck' factor is still there even though the technology is already there to convert treated wastewater to clean water. According to Hong, it is necessary to design their outreach programs by showcasing the technologies they have coupled with scientific findings related to these technologies to convince people that this treated wastewater was safe for reuse.

Because most of the groundwater aquifers are heavily utilized, a lot of the remaining groundwater is of poor quality and may be contaminated. Yet the public think it is safe to use this groundwater for agricultural irrigation to produce the food they eat, but they do not use treated wastewater for this purpose. With science, education and outreach, Hong hopes to convince people that with the right type of treatment technology and management practices, these waters are safe for reuse.

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